Doris Self, of Fort Lauderdale, may be a grandmother in her 80’s, but she is not giving up on her quest to regain the world highest score in Q*Bert. In fact, she is trying to regain her throne, which she held until 1985. Her quest to regain the world highest score started when champion video game player Billy Mitchell called her up and offered to loan her a Q*Bert video game machine to break the record. Doris jumped at the chance to regain her titles and has given up bridge and poker to practice day and night to claim her place in history. “I was sad when I lost the title I had held for twenty years,” laments Doris. “Then I got a call from gaming legend Billy Mitchell, who offered to loan me a Q*bert machine to practice on and win back my title. Billy made me promise that I would give up poker and practice Q*bert everyday.” With Mitchell support, Doris plans to break the Q*Bert record by June 5, during an annual gathering of classic gamers at Funspot in Weirs Beach, NH.

Advertisement

What we appreciate about this particular piece of gadgetry is the simplicity by which the target market can use it. Not all younglings are as tech-minded as mine (he is 17 months old, and can turn on anything, unlock any cell phone, and hates all “toy versions” of expensive electronics), which is why the DVD Kids Remote Control is a winner. Just the shape alone pretty much guarantees that the child will point it in the right direction, saving hours of frustration and tantrum throwing. DVD Kids will be putting out special DVD’s for use with the remote that will allow children to interact with the characters on the screen.

Latest Gear Live Videos

While this isn’t directly related to online business, I think it’s always good to have goals to work towards, even if it’s an outlandishly priced yacht or home. Forbs has compiled several lists of 2005’s most expensive statements of success and a few other things to blow your hard earned money on:

To the best of our knowledge this doesn’t actually exist yet, but it seems scientists are getting closer every day. Researchers at the University of Zurich had volunteers inhale the peptide oxytocin before investing in a faux transaction. The group that took the oxytocin turned out to trust the fake investment bankers more than the group with a placebo, proving oxytocin’s ability to enhance trust in human relationships.

You know, I enjoy giving away items on Gear Live and Playfeed. Of course, there are those who are just in it for purely selfish reasons who can’t imagine that things may sometimes get in the way. Of course, these are usually the young-un’s. Nonetheless, we have a winner. We don’t like to post results until after we have contacted the winner, and heard back from them. The reasoning behind this is that many people sign up for giveaways using fake email addresses. How, then, are we to contact you to send your prize? I digress. The winner, after 2 unsuccessful attempts to contact the original winner, is one Phil Kefer. Enjoy the faceplate with which you will have nothing to affix to for the next six months.

One of our favorite tech companies here at Gear Live is SCOTTeVEST. They make plenty of high quality, functional clothing items geared towards the gadget enthusiast. In fact, on this trip to New York that I am currently on, the SCOTTeVEST was one of the essential items that I packed. Anyways, they just made their own dancing commercial spoofing the all-so-common Apple iPod ads. I thought it was quite funny the first time around.

Turns out that 512MB of graphics memory actually does make a difference over 256MB of memory. Bigger is better, right? It was thought that 512MB was not needed for today’s specifications, however, under a lot of stress and really pushing the cards to the limit, the performance increase is seen. It’s time to save up to buy one of these little suckers.

A quick note about a new Yahoo! product to be aware of. Yahoo! is now testing their Mindset “intent-driven” search tool. It basically works in a way that allows you to tweak your results by moving a slider between informational and commercial-driven results. Here is an example:

A search for the term “iPod” normally brings Apple’s iPod homepage to the top of the results. If I slide the scale all the way over to shopping, the results change giving me a site called Happy Shopping. If I slide it over to the research side, I get iPodLounge as my top result.

What makes this so interesting is that if this takes off, it will makes your site a bit easier to find - whether it is an informational or commercial venture. Happy Shopping would never appear in the top 10 search results for the term “iPod” - let alone number one. However, if a consumer wants to buy an iPod, Yahoo! recognizes that they would get a good deal from Happy Shopping, and places them at the top.

If you have recently seen your Google PageRank go AWOL, do not worry. Google is in the midst of a mass update on their internal database, which apparently includes some 3.5 million updates. From the Google Guy himself:

Here’s the advice that I’d give now: take a break from checking ranks for several more days. Bourbon includes something like 3.5 improvements in search quality, and I believe that only a couple are out so far. The 0.5 will go out in a day or so, and the last major change should roll out over the next week or so. Then there will still be some minor changes after that as well. So my “weather report” along the lines of http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000095.html would be a recommendation that rankings may still change somewhat over the next several days.

Now, there is no guarantee that you will not see a drop in your PageRank. What he is saying is that things may be erratic over the next week or so. Just keep doing what you are doing to get your name out there, and you should (hopefully) be fine.